Texas Instruments OMAP 5 Reference Design

Texas Instruments announced it was developing the OMAP 5, the first Cortex A15 processor, in February 2012. This year at CES 2012, Texas Instruments unveiled OMAP 5-based reference design / development platform running Android 4.0.1 to Engadget.

Texas Instruments OMAP5 Reference Design

Remi El-Ouazzane, VP of OMAP at Texas Instruments, explains:

“This is the greatest platform on Earth right now… way ahead of Apple, and it’s the first Cortex-A15 (which runs 2x faster than the Cortex-A9) product on the market. When running two Cortex-A15 chips at 800MHz, it’s more or less the same performance as running two Cortex-A9s at 1.5GHz. You’ll see [commercially available products] ramping up with this stuff in late 2012 or early 2013. We are also running Windows 8 on the latest OMAP; it runs perfectly well, and we’ve been working very closely with Microsoft. We’re working on multiple form factors — tablets, thin-and-lights — and we think ARM is going to bring tablets to the masses.“

He also told Engadget to expect OMAP 5 in laptops and Ultrabooks running Windows 8 sometimes in 2013.

The OMAP5 SEVM Software Development Platform is composed of a smartphone connected to a dock station with a QWERTY keyboard. The smartphone is powered by a dual core Cortex A15 OMAP5 processor (OMAP5430) with a 720p display (1280×720) and features a 3.5mm audio jack, a mini-HDMI port, USB 3.0 ports, speaker volume buttons, a microSD slot and a SIM card slot. Camera modules can be connected to the top of the devices. The docking station has a power switch, an Ethernet port, a display port, USB debug and USB host ports as well as a MIPI debug connector on the left side (Cf. Picture above).

On the video below, they also demo’ed the smoothness of HD videos and image transitions and ran the Nenamark benchmark showing an average of 64 fps which could actually be 130 fps without the display refresh rate limitation.

OMAP5 samples and the EVM will be available as soon as next week to TI partners.

I also hope we can get a low cost development platform based on OMAP 5 later in 2012. After the BeagleBoard (OMAP 3), Pandaboard (OMAP 4), what could be the OMAP 5 development board name? It looks like the animal has to grow in size after each processor upgrade. What about the ElephantBoard? GorillaBoard ? SealBoard ? The WhaleBoard should probably be reserved for the OMAP 6 Development Board…